Court has granted Opay permission to freeze customer accounts in recovery of N714m, after system glitch allows free purchases.

 Customers of a Chinese backed Fintech company, Opay has been able to complete card payments without getting debited and have racked up a bill of N714m following

a system glitch.

The fintech however been able to take legal actions to recover the lost funds after being approved by a Federal high court in Lagos, to freeze customers bank accounts in 30 listed Banks as a part of the process to recover the lost funds.

The system glitch that allowed people to purchase items without getting debited happened between December 10, and 4th of March 2024 according to the Tech cabal.

Opay contacted customers who received value of unsuccessful transactions that are over N500,000 in a bid to recover the funds. This customers were contacted via phones and emails, but only 10% obliged according to the report. "While some customers positively responded to the applicants requests and cooperated with the applicants in respect to recover the Erroneously retained credits. Whereas some customers have refused, or neglected to fund their accounts to enable Opay to deduct the value of the Erroneously retained funds from their accounts respectively", The company said in a court filling 

The fintech asked court to freeze the customers account  and filed an affidavit of urgency alongside it's application. The appeal order was granted by the court on 28 of June, 2024. And Opay will now begin to inform 30 banks to restrict the affected customers account.

Okay declined to respond to comments. Financial institutions use bank response codes to  categorise successful, pending, and unsuccessful transactions. For Opay, 'RC 09' is the code for pending transactions, for which the company does not debit it's customers. However, from 10th December, several card holders made payments for pending transactions without getting debited.

" The switching company (interswitch), that facilated the said card transactions between Opay and it's cardholders during this period settled all the 'RC 09' transactions as successful" Opay said in it's filling.

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